A Guide to the Best of Southern California : DIVERSIONS : Behind the Scenes
George Lucas went to school here. So did Robert Zemeckis. Steven Spielberg didn’t, but a music-scoring stage bears his name.
On Fridays at 2:30 graduate student Susan Lambert guides a free one-hour tour through the USC Cinema-Television Complex. “It’s sort of a bare-bones Universal Studios kind of tour, without the tram,” Lambert says.
Visitors troop through the George Lucas Instructional Building, resting for a moment on cushy screening-room seats; the huge Harold Lloyd Motion Picture Sound Stage with its laboratories, and the Marcia Lucas Post-Production Building containing film and video editing facilities. Along the way, Lambert describes the movie-making process and explains the difference between a grip and a dubber.
“We do a lot of on-the-edge kind of stuff,” Lambert says, noting that students did one of the first narratives using High Definition-TV as well as the computer animation for some IMAX films.
USC Cinema-Television Complex, 850 W. 34th St., Los Angeles; (213) 740-2892.
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